A Generalized Guide to Wild Horse Islands: Introduction to the Game + 4 Tips
(This article is not sponsored by the game Wild Horse Islands, I just really like this game and the wiki for it on Fandom is not only somewhat barebones but also very hard to find with a Google search alone.)
Perhaps, like me, you’re a teenager/young adult who plays Roblox for some reason.
Maybe you’re in the clothing scene like Roblox fashion Youtuber icyella, who I’m a fan of. Maybe you’re a gamedev looking to get basic development skills on Roblox before starting work at a company outside of Roblox. Maybe you have a younger sibling who enjoys the site and in the process, you learned to enjoy the quirky little platform with several subcultures of its own.
Regardless, chances are you have (or haven’t since this is a pretty niche game) heard of a game called Wild Horse Islands.
Wild Horse Islands is a horse-themed RPG game made by the Roblox group Happy Acres, which currently stands at a modest 17K members and has a total of 2 developers (1 normal developer, Kavelleri, and 1 head developer, Fm_Trick, who uses the display name Trick). The game has been around for roughly 7 months, and in the process has received several updates.
It currently updates once a week, and these updates are usually a combination of QOL (quality of life) changes and addition of new content, recently in the form of a new horse breed to capture in the wild, buy from the game’s horse seller NPC Hogan, or trade for in-game with other users.
A new player of this game can (and probably will) get quickly overwhelmed by the things the game throws at you — because you see, Wild Horse Islands is not just a RPG game…It’s also a resource gathering game, an economic strategizing game, and an animal collecting game.
Your endgame goal in Wild Horse Islands is to level up, get rare horse breeds (Although what breed is the “rarest” quickly changes, as a new and rare horse breed tends to be added with every weekly game update…For example, last Friday introduced Friesians, a horse breed known for its stunning black coat and majestic light draught conformation, but the week before that everyone was ogling the Clydesdale, which is the second newest horse breed added known for its muscly draught conformation and prowess in pulling carts and carriages), and in turn gain access to rarer resources, which are sold for money or made into tack — the term for horse equipment — for your prized horses.
I want to make articles for specific parts of the game like mining, foraging, specific horse breeds, and percentage chances (most Roblox games have statistic chances for items in order to avoid seeming outright pay to win), so this will be a general tip guide that will hopefully bolster gameplay for those who play the game.
#1: Grab every single resource you see.
That piece of tin that takes 2 or 3 seconds to mine? Mine that as soon as possible. Those berry bushes you see at the base of mountains on Mainland? Spam E on those as your horse canters or gallops past them. The flowers you occasionally see in place of food crops? You’re gonna want to grab those as soon as possible.
Resource gathering is most likely what you’ll be doing for the majority of your time in this game if you want to get anywhere, whether it’s in terms of finance, levelling up, or status.
Food crops allow you to feed your horse when it’s hungry, which gives you a MASSIVE experience boost (you only get 10 XP, but you don’t really need that much XP to level up quickly so it’s a useful amount) you’ll be grateful for no matter where you are in-game. Tin is the ore I currently use for making lassoes, but stronger minerals can be used to make stronger lassoes…But they also sell for a lot more, so that’s why I’ve stuck to tin despite the strength of a tin lasso being a saddening 3. And those flowers I just mentioned? They’re used to make pastel colors when you’re making colored tack, and they’re VERY annoying to find when you’re actually looking for them.
#2: Learn what the horse hierarchy in the game is before putting out/looking for trade offers…And max out better horse breeds, if possible.
The appearance of a horse pales in comparison to two things: The horse’s breed and whether or not it’s been “maxed out”.
In general, the breed hierarchy looks something like this:
(Unreleased as of writing, the date being 1/25/22) Fjord horse
Friesian
Clydesdale
Peacock Appaloosa (this is a specific marking type, not a separate breed from Appaloosas in general)
All other Appaloosas, Paint Horse, Quarter Horse
The users in this game really don’t care about Appaloosas, Paint Horses, or Quarter Horses. The real money’s at Clydes, Friesians, and (most likely, if the trend of “Everyone wants the newst breed” continues) soon, the Fjord horse. If you’ve “maxed out” one of the big breeds, congratulations! You have a lot more leverage in the trading world than you’d have otherwise.
You’re probably wondering what “maxed out” means if you haven’t gotten that far into the game…Every horse in Wild Horse Islands has 3 trainable stats:
- Speed; higher speed means your horse is faster when cantering or galloping
- Stamina; higher stamina means your horse can gallop for a longer time, which is numerical and measured in seconds
- Strength; higher strength means your horse can jump for higher and longer
You can train your horse’s stats by speaking to the horse trainer NPC in Mainland, Steve. It easily costs a few thousand to get even a Quarter Horse maxed out, but if you’re lucky like me and your starter horse has relatively high stats when you get it (Acero started off with 45/60 stamina) then that significantly decreases the cost. People like getting a horse that’s been maxed out, so they’re going to pay you a lot more for that horse or give you better horses/more horses for it as a result.
#3: Save up some harvester upgrading cash as soon as you have a maxed out horse, and continue to upgrade it as you level up…Or you’ll deeply regret it.
Your character in Wild Horse Islands can equip, use, and upgrade a tool called a harvester. It’s essentially a pickaxe, and you have to use it in order to chop down trees and mine rocks for ores. Every time you upgrade your harvester by buying an upgraded version at the store run by the item trader NPC named Larry, its strength increases by .5. However, the price of a better harvester increases very quickly, to the point where by midgame you need to save tens of thousands of Tokens (the game’s currency) just to afford it. Once you have a maxed out horse, commit your savings to getting better harvesters, or else you’ll be spending over 10 seconds mining more valuable ores in the future.
#4: Once you’re able to access Desert Island, just mine and collect stuff on the beach until you hit level 150.
The desert is pretty barren, so foraging XP is going to sharply plummet. It won’t be like Forest Island where you could run around and get 12+ berries with every scouring of an island section…You’ll actually need to stop and go pretty frequently in order to mine gold and rubies from small caves, in addition to the ores you’ve most likely already seen on Forest Island (Silver, Copper, Bronze, and Tin).
Unfortunately, waiting for the ores you mined to respawn is super boring, so if you end up not being able to take scaling rock formations with your horse anymore, I recommend doing a loop around the beach. While you’ll mostly get wood, there’s a chance you’ll see a horse that’s profitable to capture and sell, or get rarer resources like pearls and colored seashells (You use these to make the pearl colors in tack crafting, but they’re very annoying to search for).
I’ll be writing more specific, localized guides after this, so those should hopefully pop up along with this. Until then!